Why It’s Not Too Soon For A Police Brutality Musical

The team at Adult Swim’s hit series “Black Dynamite” are starting off 2015 in much the same way they ended 2014, by reminding us that all of the cards in the deck are race cards, it just depends on how you shuffle them and who is dealing.

In the upcoming “Wizard of Watts” Black Dynamite actually tries to take some time off from breaking his boots off in the asses of bad guys and finds himself in the land of Oz-Watts run by pigs who terrorize Rodney Munchkings. It’s being billed as a “police brutality musical” with an obvious nod to current headlines of police killings around the country, but is not directly inspired by them.

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This episode has been in the works for two years, so the timing couldn’t be greater. Sometimes God just speaks through entertainers. The funny thing is when it was written it wasn’t that we were doing it in response to what’s going on now. We’ve dealt with police brutality in America forever. But it was just the perfect storm of time and opportunity where we had this content and it was like ‘oh you want to do this now? Cool we got something for this.’ It’s drawing on everything from the past, the present and to some degree the future. I don’t want to give too much away because we’re not even billing it like an episode. We’re billing it like a movie. It’s paced like a movie and the music plays a big role in the storytelling.

To say that it’s too soon to parody police brutality almost makes it seem like it’s a new epidemic, and it’s not. Rodney King was [over] 22 years ago. That was a lot of people’s first eyewitness account of what police brutality actually looks like. So even if you want to go back to that it can’t be too early. Anything that happened from then on is fair game. If it’s too soon to parody it it’s too soon to protest it. It’s all the same thing, it’s just a different medium that we’re expressing our voice in.

This is an extended parody all the way out to the movies we’re referencing, so it’s gonna feel really, really familiar to you.You know the story and how it plays out, but once you see the comments we’re making, there are some really, really good moments.It’s a really good piece and I can’t wait for y’all to see it.